FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

ANSWERS TO THE MOST COMMON DIGITAL MARKETING QUESTIONS

General

Digital Marketing is a relatively new form of marketing that utilises the internet, electronic devices and digital channels to connect with prospects and customers.

A digital channel is an internet-connected platform, website or software that makes communication possible.
This can include websites, email, social media, organic search, paid search, apps, webinars, display ads and more.

As defined above, digital marketing is mostly any marketing activity that is online.
Conversely, traditional marketing is generally any marketing activity that is offline. This includes marketing channels such as newspapers, TV & radio ads, direct mail, billboards, etc.
Traditional marketing focuses on generic brand messages and mass audience targeting that are generally locked in for long campaigns, whereas digital marketing allows for highly targeted, flexible and data-driven campaigns that can be tested and changed at the click of a button.

Digital marketing has evolved to the point where a large amount of specialists consult with businesses to develop effective strategies and implement campaigns.
A digital marketer should have a vast understanding of digital channels, and is responsible for strategising, implementing, testing and optimising marketing campaigns that promote a company and its products and/or services.

If your customers and target market use digital devices or spend time online, then your business should definitely be implementing digital marketing campaigns.
Statistics show that the use of digital channels is increasing every year, which can be a great opportunity for your business to meet your target market where they are already spending time.

There are many factors that go into an effective digital marketing campaign such as choosing the correct digital channel for your target market, aligning your campaign with your brands message, the copy and visuals, campaign structure, targeting options, daily spend etc.
Therefore, switching your marketing efforts to digital marketing will not necessarily guarantee leads if you do not have the experience and understanding of these fundamental factors.

Your digital marketing goals must align with your overall business goals to be effective, which may not always be to generate leads. That’s why when we develop campaigns for our clients, we get to know their business operations and objectives, and then propose plans to align with those goals.

We are so confident that our services will beat your expectations that we offer no lock in contracts on all of our services.
If, for any reason, you’re not happy with the service or results that we provide, contact us clearly stating that you wish to cancel your accounts with us and we will stop the invoices immediately.

We are so confident that our services will beat your expectations that we offer a full 30 day Money Back Guarantee on all of our services.

We recommend to start digital marketing by thinking about your target audience and current audiences. This will help you to determine which digital channels and platforms to focus on that will resonate with your audience. 

Next, think about your marketing objectives and how you can align these with your business goals.

It’s also important to create business pages on social media accounts to reserve your company’s name and purchase your domain name through any domain registrar such as GoDaddy, NameCheap, CrazyDomains, NetRegistry etc.
If you already have a website, you should try to optimise your website for search engines and target keywords in your copy.
You should also create a strategy to drive traffic to your website by utilising PPC, SEO, referrals programs, or other.

The tools you use should ultimately depend on the goals of your marketing campaigns, but there are a few tools that are relevant for every business. They include:

  • Google Search Console for communication between your website and Google.
  • Google Analytics or similar for website reporting and tracking. This tool will show detailed analytics of your website including how many people visit your website each month, which pages they look at, where they are from and much more.
  • Facebook Pixel to help you track conversions from Facebook ads, build targeted audiences and remarket to people who have already engaged with your website in a particular way.
  • Lighthouse for possible improvements to your website’s performance, accessibility and SEO.
  • Google My Business for a free business listing on Google search engine or Google Maps.
  • Google Keyword Planner for keyword research.
  • Ahrefs and SEMRush for SEO planning and implementation.

Website Development

At the start of our project, we will run you through a discovery session to determine objectives and expectations of the particular project. From there, agreement to our terms and a 10% deposit will be organised, before requesting generic assets from your business including:

  • Logo & branding artwork.
  • All images that you want to include.
  • A document that includes all copy for each page of the website, or a list of dot points that we can translate into fluent copy.
  • Access to your domain account (to point the domain to the new servers) and web hosting account (if available).
  • Access to your existing CMS (if available).

We allow for as many changes as required (during the development phase) to make your website look exactly how you expected it to look. At the start of the project we will send you a live link of your website in development that you can access at any time to check progress.
After each phase of the project, we will consult with you to make sure the website is on track and to submit any comments about changes or alterations.
We ask that if you do require changes, they are submitted in a single email or document to keep track of all communications.

As your project is finalised, we will consult with you for final comments before sending an invoice for the remaining balance and switching your site to live.
Once the website is live, any additional changes will be quoted at an hourly rate unless you have signed up for our maintenance & support packages.

The cost of designing and developing your new website depends on the complexity and features of the website, but as a general guide can be split into the following areas:

  • Domain name
  • Upfront cost of website design and development – prices depend on the complexity and features of the website
  • Ongoing website hosting server
  • Ongoing Care Plan (optional) for maintenance, support & content updates

Data collection should be vitally important in your digital marketing efforts. Tracking website metrics can help you to understand your visitors demographics and interests, what pages get the most views, where visitors are coming from and where they click to, how often you’re meeting your online goals, and much more.
This information can be used to determine which content and campaigns are most effective, and to understand your target market with more clarity and where there are “blocks” in your customer journey etc.

Although you aren’t able to identify individuals who visit your website, tracking softwares will allow you to see an aggregate view of visitor data. Some of the data you can find inside of tracking softwares include:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Language
  • Users interests
  • New or returning visitor
  • Device used
  • Channels and sources they came from
  • What pages are navigated to most
  • Average session duration
  • Bounce rates
  • What time of the day your users are visiting
  • And much more

For most businesses, their website is their first point of contact with potential customers. It’s where customers go to find more information about your business, to learn more about your products and services, and to contact you. You should take a moment to visit your website and ensure that it gives the right impression to your visitors.
The internet and search engines are always changing. And regular website updates are one of the many factors that search engines algorithms consider when determining what position your website should rank. A frequently updated website will have more success with organic search engine rankings than a website that has been left unattended over the years.
At a bare minimum, your website’s Content Management System (CMS), plugins and themes should be updated as they become available to ensure security and speed.

The majority of clients who approach us already have a website. In some cases, the website needs to be optimised to acquire additional conversions. In other cases, a complete overhaul of the website and web servers is required.
There are many factors that make up a high-performing and converting website:

  • A website with no clear direction will confuse visitors.
  • A website that is not engaging will bore visitors.
  • A website that is slow, unreliable or difficult to navigate will frustrate visitors.
  • If your Content Management System has limitations, you may not be able to create the UX that your customers want.
  • If your softwares and applications can not integrate with your website, you may be missing out on important user-behaviour data.

A wholesome view of your website and web architecture is taken into account when deciding whether your website requires technical changes or a complete overhaul.

All of our website packages include the following at no extra cost:

  • Fully customisable content
  • Responsive across desktop, mobile and tablet views
  • SSL certificate
  • Indexed and basic optimisation for search engines (SEO packages can be purchased at additional cost)
  • Set up of analytics accounts
  • Installation of tracking codes
  • Security improvements
  • Daily website and database backups
  • Speed improvements including caching and CDNs (if required)
  • 2* basic professional email accounts

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is the process of optimising your online content so that search engines show it as the top result for certain keywords in the organic (non-paid) results.

This question is widely speculated and debated in the SEO-world because Google, and other search engine companies, do not provide clear details as to how their algorithms work.
In this article by Backlinko, more than 200 ranking factors have been deemed to determine how well your website is ranked on Google.
It’s safe to say that optimising your search engine presence is not a straight forward task, although many experts agree that rankings are more generally based on the relevance and authority of the website.

As with all our services, every client’s SEO project is different in some way. The general process includes:

  1. Analysis of existing data and audits of current website, audiences, keywords, and competitors
  2. Strategic planning and goal setting
  3. Implement on-page SEO
  4. Implement off-page SEO
  5. Track and analyse changes to rankings
  6. Continuous improvement of campaigns, and continue building on-page and off-page SEO

The majority of people who spend time browsing search engines have a greater degree of intent as compared to other channels.
For example, if the searcher is looking to make a purchase by searching for “best plumber near me”, “top restaurants in Melbourne”, “best first date ideas in Melbourne”, or “where to find party supplies”, they know exactly what they want and are looking for your business to satisfy that desire. The businesses that show up on the first page of Google will take approximately 80% of that traffic.

When Google updates their algorithms, they will penalise websites that breach their search engine guidelines. If you build spammy links, over optimise your pages, and engage in black hat SEO, your website will most likely be negatively affected.
But if your website is optimised in accordance with Google’s guidelines, you are likely to see an increase in rankings and traffic as their algorithm updates roll out.

Getting indexed by a search engine is a fairly simple and quick process through the Google Search Console or similar. Once a page has been added to your sitemap and a crawl request has been registered, it can take up to 4 weeks for Google bots to crawl your website and be added to search engines.

Your SEO efforts should be seen as long-term marketing campaigns as it may take 6 months or more to even start seeing significant results.
Search Engine Journal has put together a rough guideline of the time it can take to rank on the first page of Google¹. For a new website, it estimates 9-12+ months for competitive keywords or 1-4+ months for non-competitive keywords. For household names and major brands, 3-6+ months for competitive keywords or 1+ months for non-competitive keywords.

The time it takes to see improved results is dependent on a number of factors including:

  • Competitiveness of your industry and keywords
  • Domain age/authority, and whether the site has been penalised previously
  • Previous optimisations
  • The amount of quality content you create

As the name suggests, a sitemap is a map of your site. It’s an XML document that provides information about the pages, videos and other files on your site for search engines to recognise what content you want indexed.

Search engines read this file to understand what pages they can and can’t crawl, what pages are most important, how often to look for changes, where new content is located, how long ago the content was updated, and much more.
A sitemap is critical to successful indexation, especially for websites that are complex in structure and have regularly-updated content.

Both SEO and PPC have their advantages and disadvantages. Put simply:

  • PPC is a great way to instantly deliver traffic to a website but it costs money. In particular industries and niches, PPC can be so competitive that smaller businesses can not afford the inflated costs.
  • SEO, on the other hand, can take an extended amount of time to start seeing results, but is free to implement. For keywords and phrases that have a high ranking difficulty, a simple competitor analysis can show you exactly what keywords they are going after, what backlinks they have acquired, the structure of their content, and much more. This information can be used as a benchmark to rank above them.

Therefore, one is not better than the other, but most businesses find that a mix of both (along with other methods of lead generation) works best.

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people are entering into search engines. The goal of keyword research is to identify keywords that have a high search volume, with limited competition.
Understanding which keywords to target at the start of your SEO campaign will help you to determine the type of content to create, and how to organise that content on your website to attract a maximum amount of visitors.

For most local businesses, the goal of your SEO campaign should be to attract qualified prospects to your website that are looking to perform a desired action.
For example, if a landscaping business is doing SEO, their main goal should be to attract people who are looking to get landscaping done to “get a quote”, “make a phone call” or “book an appointment”.

The answer to this question will depend on your individual situation but we highly recommend that SEO is implemented into your website as it is being built out. This will ensure that Google sees your website as well structured, fast, and using the right keywords and heading tags the first time they crawl your website.

Duplicate content is defined by Google as “blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”.
Having duplicate content on your website with the intent to manipulate rankings or deceive users can result in significant penalties such as negative adjustments to rankings or even completely removing your websites indexation.

The following are typical examples of how duplicate content can damage your SEO:

  • Duplicating an entire domain
  • Duplicating entire pages
  • Duplicating content across multiple pages of a website and only changing the keyword
  • Having “templated” content on every page (eg. same product description on every product page)
  • Copying content from other websites and publishing it as your own
  • Publishing your website’s content on other websites or forums

There’s A LOT that goes into SEO. And it is constantly changing with new technologies and updates to search engine algorithms.
To get the best and most up-to-date information about everything SEO, the following blogs provide a huge amount of value:

PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click and is essentially a way of buying web traffic. There are two main types of PPC:

  • Search engine advertising: advertisers bid on keywords in order to appear at the top of search engines results when somebody performs a search for/similar to those keywords.
  • Advertising on partner networks: text ads, display ads, or banner ads can also be placed on numerous partner sites. These ads can be placed through the Google Network (eg. Maps, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, partnering websites across the internet, etc.), social media ad networks (eg. Facebook & Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.), or through web advertising platforms (such as Taboola, Outbrain, etc.).

An ad network is a technology platform that delivers your ads to users. If you want to create PPC ads you will need to use an ad network.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager are examples of ad networks. These ad networks are where you will build your campaigns, manage your audiences, define targeting options, pay for your ads, analyse results, and more.

The location and appearance of PPC ads will differ depending on the network you are using and the objective of your PPC campaign. Most PPC ad networks will allow you to choose where to show your ads – most commonly on their own platform/app.

For example, a campaign in Google Ads will appear on Google’s SERPs as a headline, description and web address.
An ad on Facebook with the objective of brand awareness will appear inside of the Facebook app and will include a headline, copy, visuals (image, video or slideshow) and a call to action button.
A Facebook ad with the objective of lead generation will also include an in-built lead form to collect details of propspects.
A banner ad will appear on websites specified and only include an image that links to your landing page/website.

The hidden power of PPC is in the targeting and retargeting potential that it can offer. Different PPC types and ad platforms will offer different targeting options, but some typical examples include demographics targeting (location, age, gender, household income, job title, level of education, parental status, etc.), interests and behaviours (hobbies, life events, consumer behaviour, prior purchases/actions, device, etc.), lookalike audiences, and retargeting (reconnect with contact lists, website visitors, app users, etc).
The correct PPC targeting can be extremely powerful. Incorrect PPC targeting will see your ads being shown to the wrong people and your moneys being wasted.

Ultimately, your PPC campaigns should aim to attract new, or recurring, paying customers to your business. But the goal of each individual campaign can differ substantially when targeting different audiences or as you guide a prospect down the sales funnel.

PPC campaigns allow you to choose between several campaign objectives including:

  • Sales
  • Leads
  • Website Traffic
  • Brand Awareness & Reach
  • Engagement
  • Video Views
  • App Installs

Most businesses fall into the trap of hard-selling a prospect on their first encounter with them. From a marketing point of view, this approach rarely works for both online and offline marketing, and you will be paying more per customer than if you were to guide them down the sales funnel.
For example, you can set up a campaign that initially reaches large audiences for small costs (reach objective or video views objective), and then retarget an audience that engaged with your first campaign to offer them a special offer or discount.

Ad spend is your PPC ad network budget – it’s how much you’re willing to spend on your PPC campaigns. In most cases, this is specified as a monthly figure.

Most ad networks charge on a cost-per-click (CPC) bidding style – you will only need to pay when a user clicks on your ad. The other common paid advertising bidding styles include cost-per-mille (CPM – you pay per 1,000 time your ad is shown), and cost-per-acquisition (CPA – you pay when a user completes a goal on your website eg. submits a contact form, make a transaction, download a file, etc.).

Your ad spend can be allocated between different PPC campaigns on the same ad network, or distributed over several ad networks. For example, consider a business with a $5,000 monthly ad spend. One way to allocate their ad spend would be as follows:

  • Google ad spend: $2,500/month
  • Facebook campaign 1 ad spend: $900/month
  • Facebook campaign 2 ad spend: $600/month
  • Web advertising platforms ad spend: $1,000/month
  • Total monthly ad spend: $5,000

Your ad spend can also be changed or stopped at any point of the campaign.

One of the more basic ways to decide how much you should be spending on PPC is to reverse engineer the results you’re aiming to achieve. For example, if you need 20 new customers in a month and your close rate is 10%, then you will need a PPC lead goal of 200 conversions for that month. If your cost per lead is $20, you will need to spend $4000 per month to drive that many leads and customers. Therefore, Ad Spend = (# of New Customers / Close Rate) * Cost Per Lead.

It’s also vital to understand your return on investment (ROI) when calculating ad spend. If you’re putting $100 into PPC advertising and getting $200 out, it would make sense to continue or to increase your ad spend. On the contrary, if you put $100 in and get $50 out, you should look into testing, tweaking or stopping the campaign.

Your ad spend is very flexible when running PPC ads, with the ability to stop or change payments at any time.

To ensure clarity in the billing process, your ad budget will be paid directly to the ad network that you use (eg. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) via credit card. We will guide you through the process of setting up your accounts.

Your PPC campaign’s performance can be tracked within the ad network reporting area which you will have complete access to at all times. Your website anayltics account can also be used to track visitors, conversions and more.
At the end of each month, we will send a performance report and call to discuss in detail.

You need to be most involved in your PPC account for new campaigns. Checking up on the account at least twice per day is highly recommended.
Once the campaign has been running for a few days, it’s advised to check in at least 3 times per week to make sure everything’s running smoothly.
A thorough review should be completed at least once per week.

As a general rule, the more time you spend monitoring your PPC campaigns, the better they will perform. This, of course, assumes that you know what to look for and how to optimise your ads. For example, if you notice a high click-through-rate (CTR) but a low conversion rate for mobile users, you may look into tweaking your landing page or removing them from your audience.

Your PPC ads may not be visible due to a number of reasons including:

  • Keyword:
    The most obvious reason could be to ensure that the keyword phrase you are searching for actually aligns with the keywords targeted in your PPC campaign.
  • Budget:
    If your campaigns daily budget is not large enough to show to 100% of the daily search volume, your ad will be limited in an effort to stay within your ad budget. You can check this through the Search Lost Impression Share due to Budget Limitations metric.
  • Targeting Parameters:
    If you do not fit your own targeting parameters, your ad will be excluded from being shown to you. Do you fit into the geographic regions, household income, consumer behaviour, etc. that you have specified for your ad targeting?
  • Bid Adjustments for Time:
    Similar to targeting parameters, if your campaigns are set to be offline during certain days/hours you won’t see your ads during those times.
  • Bid Adjustments for Device:
    Similar to targeting parameters, if you’re searching on a mobile device you may not see your ads due to bid adjustments that limit mobile traffic.
  • Ad Rank:
    In a similar way to the budget limitations, if your ad rank is low your ads will not show for 100% of the daily search volume. You can check this through the Search Lost Impression Share due to Rank metric.
  • Relevance:
    If you perform regular searches to try and trigger your own ads, eventually Google will assume that after seeing your own ads frequently without interacting with them, that these ads are not relevant to you.
  • IP Exclusion:
    IP addresses can be excluded from seeing ads to prevent click fraud or wasting ad spend by clicking on your own ads. If you can’t see your ads at the location you created them but you can elsewhere, this may be the cause.

Therefore, just because you can’t see your PPC ads does not mean that they aren’t running successfully.

Your PPC ads will show below a competitors ads when your ad rank is lower than theirs. The 2 main drivers of ad rank are:

  1. Max CPC/Bid Amount
  2. Quality Score


The quick fix is to increase your keyword bids until your ad shows higher than your competitors.
Another fix would be to work on increasing your quality score by testing ad copy for improved click-through rates, or optimising your landing pages and user experiences for decreased bounce rates.

It is also worth noting that having top position does not necessarily equate to more clicks. Some ads perform better in second or third position if they are more relevant to the users search query.

If you fit into your competitors targeting parameters for their PPC campaigns, you are likely to see their ads. But the reason why you’re seeing their ads everywhere, probably has something to do with an extremely powerful tool called retargeting.

Retargeting works by setting a cookie in a users browser when they visit your site or complete a desired action (eg. visit a certain page on your website, watch 50% of a video ad, click the “learn more” button, etc.).
You can then set up ads to specifically target those users who have engaged with your website or previous ads in a certain way. This approach of segmenting users based on where they are on the customer journey will allow you to create highly relevant messages.

For example, if you searched a competitors website or clicked on their ads, you will likely have a retargeting cookie set in your browser. This will add you to their “retargeting audience” and give them a good indication that you are somewhat interested in their products or services. They will then be able to explicitly target you (and users who have completed a similar action) to run follow up ads to.

We recommend all businesses use retargeting ads to improve the relevancy and efficiency of PPC ads.

If you find that many competitors are bidding on your brand name, it’s typically a good idea to do the same in order to take up as much real estate on the page as possible and ensure that searchers find your brand instead of your competitors. Branded clicks are generally extremely inexpensive and can be well worth the minimal cost to ensure that your competition doesn’t steal users that are searching for your brand.

While we have answered some of the most common FAQs on Digital Marketing, Website Development, SEO &  PPC, there are many more that have not been included.

If there’s something you can’t quite figure out or need help with, feel free to get in touch and we will do our best to help.

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